What is Author Co-Citation Analysis

There is an explosion in the amount of data that organizations generate, collect, and store. Organizations are gradually relying more on new technologies to access, analyze, summarize, and interpret information intelligently. Data mining, therefore, has become a research area with increased importance (Amaratunga & Cabrera, 2004). Data mining is the search for valuable information in large volumes of data (Hand, Mannila, & Smyth, 2001). It can discover hidden relationships, patterns, and interdependencies and generate rules to predict the correlations, which can help the organizations make critical decisions faster or with a greater degree of confidence (Gargano & Ragged, 1999). There is a wide range of data mining techniques, which has been successfully used in many applications. This article is an attempt to provide an overview of existing data mining applications. The article begins by explaining the key tasks that data mining can achieve. It then moves to discuss applications domains that data mining can support. The article identifies three common application domains, including bioinformatics, electronic commerce, and search engines. For each domain, how data mining can enhance the functions will be described. Subsequently, the limitations of current research will be addressed, followed by a discussion of directions for future research.